Mega Millions Price Increase Comes With Improved Odds — Here’s What’s Changing
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Two weeks ago, your odds of winning the Mega Millions jackpot were worse than getting struck by lightning, hitting a hole-in-one, or meeting someone with your exact birthday. After recent changes to the game, that’s still true—but your chances have slightly improved.
The Mega Millions game now offers a better shot at winning any prize, improving the overall odds from 1 in 24 to 1 in 23. Six out of the nine prize tiers—including the jackpot—also got better odds, thanks to one small change: the Mega Ball pool was reduced from 25 numbers to 24.
Here’s how a ticket works now: you pick five white balls from numbers 1 to 70, and one gold Mega Ball from numbers 1 to 24. This update started with the April 8 drawing.
But the changes didn’t stop there. The cost of a ticket has jumped from $2 to $5. The optional "Megaplier" is gone, replaced by a built-in multiplier (2x, 3x, 4x, 5x, or even 10x), boosting the minimum prize amounts across tiers.
The new setup means there are now 290,472,336 possible number combinations for a ticket—an improvement over the previous 302,575,350. That’s about a 4% bump in your odds of hitting the jackpot. Still, as Andrew Swift, professor and department chair of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences at the University of Nebraska Omaha, puts it: “You had very, very little chance of winning the jackpot before, and now you have slightly more—but still literally no chance.”
Swift explains that probability is simply a way of measuring uncertainty. According to the updated Mega Millions odds, your best chance at a prize—just matching the gold Mega Ball—is about 1 in 35. Six of the nine prize levels (those involving a correct Mega Ball) are now easier to win. The other three (matching 3, 4, or 5 white balls without the Mega Ball) are now harder.
How big is 290 million combinations? If you bought a ticket every second, it would take over nine years to cycle through all possibilities.
Very few things are harder to achieve than a lottery jackpot win. One example? Picking a perfect March Madness bracket—estimated at 1 in 9.2 quintillion. Swift adds, “There’s very few things on the same order of magnitude as winning the lottery.”
Want a mental image of how rare hitting the jackpot is? It’s about as likely as flipping a coin 28 times in a row and getting heads every time. Sounds impossible? Try it.
Swift says people’s perceptions of probability often lead them astray. For example, many students think choosing numbers like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 is a bad idea because it “looks wrong.” But that sequence is just as likely as any other.
“They’ll say, ‘That’s virtually impossible.’ And I say, ‘Yes—but I can say the same about any five numbers,’” Swift says. “Your brain just doesn’t like how it looks.”
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